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The PoP framework’s slogan is “Break the information monopoly”. Today, we are finally able to showcase our vision of what can be achieved through PoP, with the ultimate goal of decentralizing access to information on the Internet.

We have launched SukiPoP, a concept website demonstrating what we call a decentralized social network:

All content in SukiPoP is fetched, in real time, from several other websites/social networks, namely:

Agenda Urbana, a social network on political activism from Buenos Aires, Argentina

SDG-SSE, a content showcasing information related to the Sustainable Development Goals and the Social and Solidarity Economy

(These websites have been chosen randomly to be part of SukiPoP, with the only objective of demonstrating the concept; there is no common topic among them)

When visiting SukiPoP’s homepage, we are presented with a calendar of events (must click on the title to open the calendar). It can be seen how all events from all different websites are all displayed all together, in one single place, with different background colours to differentiate all websites:

Similarly, when scrolling down, we have the content feed, which is gathering content from all websites. To show it clearly, we visualize it as the list format and showing 3 items:

And when clicking on any external link, it opens the external page directly within SukiPoP:

The content aggregation takes place all throughout the website:

when searching for information (for both content and users), the search will be performed on all websites, and the results will be displayed in one single place

when viewing a hashtag’s page, it will show all content with that hashtag from all websites

all events are shown on one single events map

etc

The decentralization also works for posting content

Fetching content on real time is not the only feature: whenever we interact with the content coming from any website, such as adding a comment, recommending a post, or following a user, the operation will be directly executed on the original website (that is, either MESYM, Agenda Urbana or SDG-SSE), and not on the aggregator (in this case, SukiPoP).

However, the user experience is always the same, and the user can be made unaware to be interacting with external content. For instance, clicking on the “Add comment” link on a post from an external website, it opens the “Add comment” window as it would normally:

After filling in the comment, clicking on “Submit” will save the comment on the original website (in this case, MESYM). If the user is not logged into that website, a message will appear prompting the user to log in to MESYM, all within SukiPoP:

In other words, SukiPoP handles the user session for all of its aggregated websites, and makes sure users are logged in to the appropriate website whenever they need to post content there.

Even more, uploading files will also be done on the original website. After logging in, in that same “Add comment” window, we click on the “Add media” button, which will allow to insert images from, and upload images to, the original website (always MESYM):

And when clicking on the external post’s author “Send message” link, we can send a message to a user from MESYM all from within SukiPoP:

The end goal is to allow any user from any website, to be able to interact with all content and users from other websites, without having to be part of a centralized platform.

What comes next

SukiPoP is a work in progress, we are already working on incorporating the following elements:

An overview of all external websites, having a unique style to represent them throughout the aggregator (always same background colours for all content from each website), and clearly visible to the user

The possibility to filter content from specific websites (clicking on a checkbox next to the website name, it will show/hide all its corresponding content all throughout the website)

Addition of a marketplace to each website, to create a decentralized marketplace (users will be able to buy products from different websites/shops, all at the same time, from a central place)

Addition of categories, to classify all aggregated websites under common topics (eg: category ‘sports’ will show content from websites ‘football.com’, ‘tennis.com’ and ‘basketball.com’)

The possibility to select, on runtime, from which subset of websites to show content from (eg: for a decentralized marketplace, select those websites whose shops are located near the user)

The possibility to launch customizable social networks within SukiPoP for any visiting user; these social networks are to be hosted under SukiPoP’s cloud infrastructure, and feed its content directly to SukiPoP, in addition to being an autonomous website all by itself